Earthly Powers (53 page)

       "Carlo," she said, "told me all about Malaya. You expected him to work a miracle, he said."

       "Did he tell you everything?"

       "His letters are like preparatory notes for letters. He said something about God making the decisions. He mentioned an unknown child in that Chicago hospital. I," she said, "don't believe in miracles. I shall have leisure now to decide what precisely I do believe in. But I shall keep the façade up. I have two very holy children." She turned back toward the house so I did too. "I'll take you up on that kind offer," she said. "Thank you. Chiasso may turn out to be just that little bit dull."

       I swathed my ithyphallus in hand towels that night, noting that the sheets had been, ostentatiously, tucked in in hospital style at the corners, changed. I woke six times to find seed pumping out, no less lavishly at the sixth than at the first. Shaken, but not notably weaker, I went to see a doctor in Milan, Ennio Einaudi, a first cousin of my Italian publisher. I may say here that I had not come to this region solely to see the widow Campanati. With the fascist restriction on the exportation of the lira I had to collect my royalties in cash and spend the cash within the borders of the Italian homeland, the new empire not having yet been built. It was from this period that I began to make use of the services of a Roman dentist, except, of course, during the war that was still fourteen years off. Dr. Einaudi, a bearded man in his fifties, said that I was suffering from spermatorrhea, an ailment pretty rare in Italy, associable, according to the textbooks anyway, with guilt, overwork, depression and, if I understood him aright, loneliness. When the sexual urge came, he said, I must take advantage of it. He himself, to judge from the loud and many voices of children wafting in with the cheesy scent of riso al burro when the door opened from his living quarters, was a man who had always taken advantage of it. I said nothing of my homosexuality but, following his prescription, picked up a ready dark thin Sicilian immigrant in the shadow of the Duomo and was led by him to a complaisant filthy albergo for the afternoon. So there I was back again with bugs, sweat, open vowels and brutal shoving. I was visited with no reproving vision of Carlo or Raffaele the younger or poor well-loved Philip, though my mother peered in briefly at the window without seeming to recognise me. It was a therapeutic act performed in far from aseptic surroundings. The condition 2 began to ease and eased further in Paris, relieved with Algerians or chilled out with memories of them, some of them. I evaded the expected breakdown.

       October the seventeenth, the Salle Gareau. A fair audience, mostly there to hear Albert Poupon, but Hortense and myself and Concetta Campanati were joined by Antheil and Pound and, for some reason, the Misses Stein and Tokias, for the calming and encouragement of sweating Domenico. The Conservatoire Orchestra under Gabriel Pjerné (best remembered now for his little piece about little fauns) began with two of Debussy's Nocturnes-Nuages and Fetes, Sirnes requiring a female chorus that was always a nuisance to rehearse and, anyway, put up the cost—and then Poupon waddled on to applause extravagantly acknowledged. He was like a prosperous provincial grocer whose pastime was dancing, bald with an old-time walrus moustache, a carnation nodding in his buttonhole. He spent an excruciating two minutes adjusting his piano seat, cracked all his fingers in a manner that suggested he was counting the tempo for Pierné, then smashed out the opening solo two measures. The orchestra, wind machine and sizzle cymbal and xylophone and all, clonked and squealed and shouted five simultaneous themes in five different keys, each of them, considered separately, as banal as the others. So there it was, Domenico's piano concerto, first movement, allegro con anima, polytonally up to date and yet strangely old-fashioned with its corny jazz riffs on wa-wa trumpets and glissading trombones. Domenico watched and listened with a kind of incredulous awe: God, what a genius he unexpectedly had. The second subject on solo piano with accompanying muted divided strings playing chords like a representation of brave suffering was a kind of blues tune with flattened third and seventh: I was sure that Domenico could never have sold it to Tin Pan Alley. The development section was brief because Domenico did not know how to develop, and the coda, when it came at last, bore an embarrassing resemblance to "Onward Christian Soldiers," though well peppered and vinegared with discords. The slow movement seemed to be made up of some of the Puccinian themes of Poverj Rjcchj but was notable for its left-hand arabesques, grotesquely mocking, Domenico clearly being ashamed of an outmoded romantic lyrical gift which was really all he possessed. The concluding moto perpetuo was tricks and fireworks, farts and shrieks, and a fugato which Domenico was insufficiently skilled in counterpoint to make into more than a tasteless joke on someone insufficiently skilled in counterpoint. Thuds, bellows, a tune like 'Some of These Days," a sidedrum crescendo, contrary glissades on black and white keys, highheld dissonance on trumpets and horns tremolando, the chromatic scale played synchronically fortissimo, and it was all over. Acclamation West de la musique moderne, mon pote), Poupon graciously pointing to Domenico in the audience, making him stand, bow, sweat, look modest, smirk, then sit. We all clapped hard except Domenico's mother, who tapped gently 2 three left-hand fingers on right palm. Interval. The second half was to consist of Beethoven's Seventh. Domenico's friends, not wishing to see their loyalty impaired, did not propose staying for that. I must say again what I have already represented myself as saying, namely that I was, am, no judge of music. On the other hand, I was convinced that Domenico had a musical future, but it was not yet possible to suggest in what direction it might lie, this being only 1925.

       "So," I said to Concetta as we took a nightcap of brandy and soda under my rosy floorlamps' blessing, "that was it. Domenico's triumph. You too must be very proud."

       "Don't mock." She was elegant in Worth black wool with pearls. "Leave the mockery to Domenico. Did he tell you about his next proposal?"

       "He told me nothing."

       "The money that Raffaele left him. He says he's going to use some of it to buy time to write a Requiem. In memoriam his caro fratello. Negro spirituals for some reason. A Dies Irae with police whistles and Chicago typewriters as they're called."

       "Did he say that?"

       "He said it must combine the extravagantly modern and the austerely traditional. Large orchestra with saxophones. Double chorus and little boys in the organ loft. For heaven's sake try to put him off doing it."

       "Carlo's the man for that. He combines in one person all the needful kinds of authority—spiritual, familial, artistic. He also has a very thick fist. But I don't think we need worry. Domenico's no Verdi. The energy of that work tonight seemed to me factitious. More noise than drive."

       "A pity he got so much praise. From that wild man—what's his name, Anthill?"

       "George Antheil. He calls himself the bad boy of music."

       "And that fat Jewish woman. And her sort of satellite. I fear for poor Hortense when they get into bed tonight. If she shows any tepidity he'll get to work with his own thick fist."

       "She can always brain him with her bust of André Gide. Very solid art."

       "I didn't know," Concetta said, picking up a copy of Woran Sic Sich Nicht Erinnern Will from the floor by her chair, "that you read German."

       "I'm learning. I have to learn. Strehler's quite incredible. I've done something I never dreamed I'd do—well, not since my Henry James days—sent him a gushing schoolgirl letter, in English of course. No reply as yet. Perhaps he gets lots of them. Do you know his work? If not you must. He's absolutely—"

       "Dock aLc uns der Fliegenpilz seine Wirkung entzog, als kein GlŸck rnehr nachddmmern wolite," she read, with a light tripping accent that evoked noth ing of the Teutonic North, "aLi wir uns—"But," I said, amazed, "really, I never cease to be—"

       "My Alto Adige inheritance," she said. "This looks good."

CHAPTER 42

It was 1928, and Hortense's two and only children were now talkative human beings, spouting to their uncle or tonton or zio Ken the kind of macaronics to be expected in trilingual infants, using strap to mean rip, calling the moon the lun and the watertaps robinettes. The conventional sexual differentials of dress and hair style had been imposed on them; otherwise, when not in the bath, they were the same child in duplicate. "Soyez sages," Hortense bade them, dressed for the journey, the taxi already, as Eliot had taught us to say, throbbing waiting. She and I were going to London for our brother Tom's wedding. He was marrying the girl you have already briefly met, the stupid one who had been rude to me four years before in Scott's, her name Estella. The twins' nurse, a new one from Gattires on the Var, forty-odd, her eyes disillusioned and the hue of Var mud, sallow, stockings always wrinkled about her rustic ankles, a big cachou sucker, unhappily named Désirée, assured her mistress that they would be sages. Domenico would be sage too, at least in his own household. He seemed sincerely sorry that Hortense should be going off, even if for only a day or so. His eyes were moist as he embraced her. He was handsome as ever, though greying in the way known as distinguished, but plumpness was, in the Italian manner, beginning to overtake him. I too was greying but remained thin as though steadily devoured by the worms of various kinds of guilt—at my sexual aberrancy, mediocre money-making prose, failure of faith. Hortense had never, approaching her thirties, looked more beautiful or more elegant. She was in short-skirted pale green linen with darker green and white spotted contrast trimmings, horizontal tucks in her flared skirt and on the arms of the jacket, underblouse buttoned to the waist, hat with wide brim bound with spotted silk bowed with fringed ends, soft-wooled coat with collar furtrimmed, fur-trimmed too the two-tier flared sleeves. Her heels were high and brought her up almost to my own height. I was, as always, proud to be seen with her.

       Domenico had not, of course, composed that threatened Requiem. He had made money out of a graduated series of piano exercises for the young in the style of Bartok's Mikrokosmos, called breezily C'est Notre Monde, les Enfants! Re had written other things too. He was working on a set of polytonal quartets for various combinations. It bothered him that he had reached the limit of discord. A chord made out of the entire chromatic scale was, after all, as far as one could go if one did not use the microtones of H‡ba already prefigured in a song by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Little did he know that his true world was preparing to open for him.

       "Tesoro, tesoro!" The bust that Hortense had sculpted of Domenico and 2 which showed the real sullenness beneath the Milanese charm gazed with sullen blind eyes at the parting. We left to the sound of the twins demanding cad eaux from Londres, wherever that was. We were driven to Orly and there we boarded the once a day Imperial Airways biplane for Croydon. Those were the good flying times, with the ground and Channel almost palpable beneath, the natural chill of the lower air, the comfortless cane chairs antiphonally creaking to the engine's roar, and the coffee served from thermos flasks. There was an airline bus that took us from Croydon to the West End terminal, and then it was a brief taxi ride to Claridge's. As Hortense and I sat in the living room of our suite, sipping dry martinis and looking out on the Dutch façades of Brook Street, a former time was recalled to us, wartime London, my early stage success, bedtime cocoa, an artificial limb, a radiant schoolgirl innocently fascinated by the great banned book of sex. And, talking of banned books, here it all was in the Evening Standard-Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness on trial. Hortense read aloud the words of the presiding magistrate: "'The book's greatest offence is its failure to suggest that anyone with the horrible tendencies described is in the least degree blameworthy. All the characters are presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration.'" She looked up. "It says that there are forty witnesses, and that he refuses to listen to any of them. Why aren't you one of the witnesses, Ken?"

       "There wouldn't be much point, would there, if he refuses to listen." She frowned. "Sorry. I was asked. A lot of writers were asked. But I couldn't read the damned thing. It's so badly written. Have you read it?"

       "There was a copy lying around in the studio. I didn't know what it was about or else I would have."

       "It's about lesbianism."

       "I know that now, stupid. What do they do?"

       I couldn't help smiling. She'd asked that identical question all those years ago in a London living room not unlike this, though then about the brothers, not sisters, of deviancy. "They don't seem to do very much except be in love with each other. No torrid descriptions of cunnilingus and the thrust of dildos, if that's what you expect."

       "Why do you make everything sound so cold and horrid?" And then, "There's a woman here called Rebecca West. Do you know her?"

       "A very fine writer. She used to be H. G. Wells's mistress. That isn't her real name. It's the name of a character in Ibsen. She used to be an actress, you see. What does she say?"

       "'Everyone who knows Miss Radclyffe Hall wants to stand by her. But they are finding it far from easy to stand by The Well of Loneliness, for the simple reason that it is, in a way that is particularly inconvenient in the present circumstances, not a very good book.'"

       "That's precisely what I would have said. But I thought it best to say nothing."

       "And if some man had written a bad book about men doing it would you have thought it best to say nothing?"

       "The only defence you can raise in law is literary value, which they take, wrongly of course, to mean the same as moral value. You know, like Paradise Lost. It strikes me as wrong to pretend a book's good when it isn't."